Getting Close to Clawing Distance

                 13st 7lbs after breakfast, Monday started well! Then I forgot my work pass, wallet and hadn’t got much sleep so when these three realizations hit me in the work car park I wanted to crawl into the back seat of my car and sleep the day away. Fortunately I managed to get myself together enough to make into the office and once I’d got there I wasn’t getting away from it. So I’ve ploughed through today and just about made it.

                In diet news I have now tried my week without exercise. I felt lazy and fat for not going and didn’t really spend my time much more productively. Thus I have reasoned the gym and exercise are still worthwhile as part of my weekly schedule. I snuck in a quick visit on Sunday playing squash with a friend which was pretty fun, and also spawned the conversation I’m going to write about today.

                We were basically discussing ‘being thin’ versus ‘being fit’. My objective for the last year has been the former, but she’s quite far ahead of me on that and so her objective has been the latter. Having shunned weights for the majority of my workout practice I was reticent to agree initially but that was because I was looking at it from my point of view – I still need to lose weight and building muscle doesn’t do that for me. From her point of view, however, cardio is next to useless for building upper body strength and so is far less important to her as part of a workout. So we kind of went round and round in our discussion without really getting anywhere. 

                I didn’t have the above revelation until yesterday evening, so was at least half to blame for our conversation becoming a little circular. I blame the fact that I was tired from the workout and was recovering from being beaten by a girl at squash, which are terrible excuses but it’s the best I can manage. I did accept that my upper body strength was not what I wanted it to be, however, and also that I would be changing my workout system to build on this come the turning of my twenty-sixth year. That being in the very near future, however, I wondered if it was worth waiting.

                My quandary comes from the fact that I originally started my diet, and this record of it, in the pursuit of becoming thin and set out to achieve that goal within a year. I am reluctant to start doing weight work at the gym, most likely only because I haven’t done any of it before and don’t really know what I would do, because that year is not quite up yet. However after the above conversation with my friend I’ve realised my goal was flawed from the outset – or perhaps ‘restricted’ is a better word. While weight loss was my primary goal, secondary to that was being in shape. This appears to have been an unconscious aim, so much so that it took me a year to realise and/or accept it. 

Perhaps it was also related to what I like to think of realistic achievement setting; when I started my diet I was 18st and 9lbs – 261lbs – and at that stage being fit and in shape was an unrealistic goal in the conceivable future. However, now I’m in a much better place to achieve that goal so I could – and probably will – change my targets for my fitness regime to include a little more muscle and weight work. My arms are looking a bit spindly and I don’t think that’s just down to a skewed perspective from having been fat. I’m still pretty terrible at pull ups so that’s something I definitely want to work on. 

What I am trying to drive at is that each person’s diet and exercise decisions are their own, and there is only one way a plan is going to work for that person – if they like it or not. Humans are incredibly capable when it comes to finding ways not to do things that they don’t want to – so good in fact that they sometimes find themselves struggling against their own instinctive need to avoid them – this is probably a socio-culturally influenced conclusion so isn’t a hard-and-fast scientific rule, for those of you about to reject my theory. So if someone tells you this is what you must do and you disagree then you will find ways to avoid doing it, or to disprove their statement. If you don’t want to do something your instinctive response – somewhat obviously – will be to not do it. It is ingrained at some primal level. This is why habits are so hard to break, and why we look for patterns in everything. 

The trick is not to break habits, but change them. Craft your responses and behaviours like an artisan creates a sculpture; little by little and adapting older parts as new ideas form. You can become a work of art, but that does require effort. Make the effort, make yourself want to make the effort, and you’ll find yourself achieving a lot more. No, it’s not easy, but do it bit by awkward bit and you will end up with a whole you have reformed in an image you wanted. If you change your mind, you can change that form even as you go. 

So, Katie, I’m sorry I was stuck in my point of view too much we could have a proper discussion about fitness and working out. I’ll have a more open mind next time and you can show me around the weight room more. I will change my goals and my methods so that they come closer to the design I want to achieve. I will also beat you at squash, but that’s a goal for the middle future I think – especially considering how much time I spent running into walls.